Lather, rinse, repeat

So, as I tried to think about an end-of-year post for 2021, all that came to me is recycling last year's post, including the banner, to wit:

It seems that in many ways, 2021 was just a reply of 2020, innit? We're still battling the Virus  and the Republicans still seem determined to pull the country into fascism.

At the college, the Interim President thing has been a slog rather than a romp. I think we have done some good stuff, but the ever-changing posture in response to the virus and the struggles with our computer system transition project and the increase in personnel issues as folks become more and more exhausted and the recent weather-related troubles (floods and freezing) have certainly rocked us on our heels. We're still standing, but I really can't say much more than that. As one of my colleagues put it, it would be nice to come to work one day and not have to be scrappy.

Still, we can try to savor the good bits that come our way. On top of this list is that the sisters came out for a visit during the socially-distanced summer, and it had been a long time since we had been together. We also managed some al fresco get-togethers with a number of old pals we hadn't seen in person for months, but only on Zoom.

Speaking of Zoom,  I met in an online game session with my Boston pals on most Wednesdays of the year, a remarkably consistent and rewarding gaming experience.

I maintained my exercise regimen for most of the year, even though I was thrown off my pace by a broken wrist. I've completed a zillion crossword puzzles and read a few books, some of them even good. I got some new tattoos and bid farewell to my favorite ink artist; I worked on some art projects and am a bit closer to having a consistent creative practice of my own.

Selkie didn't get sick from eating almonds or pistachio shells or anything else that requires the liberal application of Benjamins to cure; for a 19-going-on-20-year-old cat, he's doing pretty well.

And of course, I still get to share every day of my life with Coco the Wonder Wife, who has done mighty work all year on her counseling master's degree and in re-upping her massage license.

Clockwise from upper left: wearing the my hat that she hates and looking totally cute; 

soaking up the sun that she loves with the cat that she loves; frolicking in the frosty air;  

prodigious and prolific pandemic puzzler.

So I guess, all things considered, I'll move forward into 2022 trying, as the song says, to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Not thinking that there won't be adversity and struggle and hard work, but rather knowing that we can face it all with hope.

I am going to buy this here because this guy is great.

A scaled-down Godzilla-fest (heh, see what I did there?)

So, two years ago we started a new holiday tradition here: Godzilla-fest, the screening of Godzilla movies as we hang around on Xmas Day. In 2019 it was the Toho collection of the Hisei-era films (13 Godzilla movie and couple Mothra flicks), and in 2020 it was the Criterion Collection of the earlier Showa-era films (15 movies). This year, the film festival was a bit smaller: just one movie.

Shin Godzilla, released in 2016, is a different kind of Godzilla movie. First of all, while previous films either were sequels that directly followed (or retconned) the continuity or the earlier films or were reboots that ignored all the earlier films except the original 1954 Gojira, Shin Godzilla presents the big monster attacking Japan for the very first time. There's even a scene that drives the point home completely: after discovering a vanished scientist's notes that refer to the creature as Godzilla, one character Googles the name and only gets one hit - a regional folklore term meaning God Incarnate.

The movie also differs in tone: while there is significant kaiju vs. building and kaiju vs. Self-Defense Force action, the story really focuses on how the bloated bureaucracy of the Japanese government gets in the way of effective action, as every decision requires a committee meeting first, ministers protect their political careers before providing for public safety, and experts hedge their conclusions to avoid saying anything wrong and wind up saying nothing of substance. The chief of staff's first action to respond to the crisis is to re-organize the crisis response team; I laughed out loud.

This approach is all deliberate, of course: just as Gojira was a melancholy reflection on the Hiroshima bombing, Shin Godzilla is a critique of the government's response to the  Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which drew considerable criticism from different quarters.There are some selfless heroes who do the right thing for the right reasons, but to do so they have out-maneuver or flat-out ignore protocols and proper channels.

So, no struggles against MechaGodzilla or battles with King Ghidora, and no swooping Mothra to help or hinder Godzilla's plans; there was destruction aplenty, no doubt, accompanied by a thoughtful rumination on what it takes to be a public servant.

Perfect for a snowy Isaac Newton's Birthday afternoon.

Solstice grinch

So, as some of you might know, I am an early riser, usually up, like today, within a few minutes on either side of 5:00 am. This gives me an interesting perspective on the winter solstice.  You see, it's pretty darn dark this time of year up here snugged against the 49th parallel, and right around this time people start saying desperately hopeful things like "Well, it'll start getting lighter soon!"

Yeah, not so much. A little more so for normal folk, but not at all for the earlybirds. Take a look at the numbers for my locale:

First, for everybody else: solstice falls on the 21st, in just a couple days. True, sunset occurs a minute later, hooray. But you know what? So does sunrise. So there's no net gain of daylight for the day. In fact, there's no net gain of daylight until five days later, on Isaac Newton's Birthday. So maybe temper  that optimism just a touch.

Now, for my own personal woe: Look at the sunrise. Tomorrow the sun rises the same time as today, but the next three weeks are actually darker in the morning than now! We don't gain any morning daylight until Rubber Ducky Day on January 13!

So you'll forgive me if I exude nothing more than the Bellingham-traditional subdued excitement on the occasion of this calendrical landmark. It's gonna be a while before I notice a difference in my morning routine.

Oh look - the sun is finally up. See ya.

All right

So, follow along with me here.

This is an oft-quoted saying from Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. To be precise, it is from Book 12, Section 17 of his Meditations, a collected summary of philosophical principles that he wrote more as a diary or self-study guide than for publication.

I resonate with these words, so much so that they will be my next tattoo project - the first phrase on my left bicep (between the "Beau Geste" rose and "Justice") and the second phrase on the right bicep (between the "Mot Juste" heart and "Truth"). (My tattoo planning leans toward the symmetrical, perhaps too much.)

But of course, Marcus did not write these words in English; as was the custom of educated Romans of the time, he wrote in Koine Greek. I wasn't sure whether I wanted the saying in Greek or in Latin, which Marcus would have spoken and which is a little closer to my heart, since I took that very lively "dead language" in in high school.

There's a ton of modern Greek translations of this saying all over the intarwebs; it seems every third Greek Twitterer uses it for a bio. The modern Greek looks like this:

αν δεν είναι σωστό μην το κάνεις 

αν δεν είναι αλήθεια μην το λες

But modern Greek isn't any part of this, so I did a little digging and found an academic site that had the original Koine:

εἰ μὴ καθήκει μὴ πράξῃς

εἰ μὴ ἀληθές ἐστι μὴ εἴπῃς

That was great - but I was still leaning toward the Latin. I dug around some more, but could not find a Latin translation of the Meditations online. The best I could do was this, from a Redditor:

Si fas non est ne feceris,

si verum non est non dicunt

Even though this checked out okay, I was mindful of all the horror stories of bad-translation-tattoos, and I needed a better source. So I contacted that even-better-than-the-Internet source: the library. Through the totally magical system of Inter-Library Loan, they got me this:

Yep, all the way from Rochester, New York, an 1840 edition of a French volume collecting classical works in Latin. The Meditations were in there as what we used to call a trot - Koine down one side of the page and Latin down the other. Perfect.

Here's the Latin version of 12.17 in that book:

Si non covenit, noli id facere,

si non est verum, noli id dicere.

A bit different in both vocabulary and syntax, but the important distinction is the verb in the first phrase: convenio, which in this context means fit or suited for. Quite a shade of difference with the straightforward right, although there is a connotative connection, innit?

The Redditor's Latin translation uses fas, which translates as right - it seems to me this might have been an English-to-Latin translation.

The modern Greek that's all over the place uses σωστό, which also translates simply as right.

Ah, but the Koine uses καθήκει   - that took some digging but it translates as fitting!

So, the modern English (and Greek) simply say right - but the sense is more like the archaic meet, which carries the nuances of fitting, proper, right, and just.

So, 19th century Institut de France trot for the win! As a final check, here's the actual trot from the book, showing the Koine and the Latin:

All that said, although I will get the tattoos in Latin (especially after this adventure!), I will use the common English translation, since I think it works best.

There - due diligence that my tattoos won't become a listicle item. All those years of teaching research writing with my librarian pal Jackie have made it so I can't do much without verifying my sources. 

And that is meet.

Technostalgia

 

That there is the Nokia 3310, probably the best mobile phone ever made. The battery lasted for days and if there was a signal to be had, this little unit would find it. It was small enough to slip in any pocket and practically indestructible. I got one of these when they came out at the turn of the millenium and it served me well for a long time.

Now this one is the Sidekick "hiptop" - my upgrade when I was in transition out of grad school a few years later. Look at that physical keyboard! And that low-res black and white screen! Beautiful. I could stay connected via email and surf the World Wide Web - that scroll dial on the right moved the cursor from active spot to active spot on each site. I stayed in touch during my first academic job search using this device.

Now I have the latest in a series of whoop-de-doo smartphones sitting on my desk, with its touch screen and two cameras and huge memory and more computing power than NORAD had during the Cold War. Each iteration of this device gets "smarter" and more complicated to the point where it's doing things without me.

This is a Timbuktu vertical Blogger Bag. There was a time in the aughts when I carried this everywhere I went, so I could always have my laptop with me as I moved from coffee shop to coffee shop grading papers. I can't remember the last time I took a laptop anywhere - my Mac Air is buried in a drawer now. That smartphone does for me.

I guess this is progress. But sometimes I long for a simpler time, when it took a little more effort to stay connected, and there was less temptation to use miraculous technology to waste time falling down rabbit holes of listicles and cat pictures, even while waiting in line, and doomscrolling wasn't a thing.

Happy Thursday

So, the history of Thanksgiving is, as we all know, fraught. The sanitized version of happy Pilgrims and Indians joining together whitewashes a multitude of sins. As schoolchildren make hand-trace turkeys, no one mentions that Squanto, one of the primary characters in the told-and-re-told story, was actually a Wampanoag man named Tisquantum, who had been kidnaped, sold into slavery in Spain, and returned to North America, all before the Mayflower arrived. It is troublesome, to say the least.

For many years,Thanksgiving in the U.S. was only spottily observed, mostly in New England, with loads of different traditions, including the trick-or-treat like custom of "ragamuffins" going door-ro-door to ask for food. It wasn't until Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, acceded to a request to establish a national holiday. To officially recognize a day of  Thanksgiving in the midst of a great national struggle seems bold, to say the least, and for me resonates with the current national mood.

Here, check out this excerpt from Lincoln's proclamation:

I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union. 

Today I am mindful of and grateful for all the good things, material and otherwise, that comprise my life, but I offer thanks in the context of the current national perverseness and civil strife, and hope that the restoration of harmony and tranquility comes soon.

Let's give thanks for what have and keep working for what we need.

Happy Thanksgiving.

World Sky Race Update

 

I know you've probably been wondering, but it still hasn't happened. And the homepage of their website is broken. And nothing is actually for sale in the store. The latest news is from January, when they kiped a post from a University of Houston podcast about helium.

Sunday, May 12, 2013

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2014

Musical instruments I do not play

 So, here's the thing:

Some years back - more than I care to calculate at this point - I bought the ukulele pictured above in a mad flight of island fancy during a trip to Maui. As time passed, I practiced irregularly, took a few lessons from time to time, and even recorded a video or two of my playing during one more active period, but really, the uke spent a lot of time idle. I am not sure if I don't have a musical soul at all, or if I just never had a long enough stretch of consistent practice to reach critical mass, or what, but I can't say with any honesty, even after all this time, that I play the ukulele.

Of course, since owning a ukulele worked out so well, I went ahead and got a mandolin, which you can also see above.

This decision was made in the service of charitable giving at an online gala supporting the Whatcom County Humane Society, and was encouraged by the enthusiasm of friends (if not spouse), spurred on by a little auction rivalry with one "Amanda", and perhaps abetted by some consumption of peanut butter whiskey. But paying entirely too much for an instrument that I cannot play was all for a good cause, so there we are. I hope the kitties and puppies are happy.

Oh, did I mention it's an electric mandolin? It came with this sweet amp and bunch of other stuff.

So, what have I learned about mandolins since making this commitment? Well, first, that they are tuned completely differently from a ukulele; that they have metal strings instead of nylon; that they are strummed or plucked with picks; and that the likelihood of my actually learning to play one is certainly no worse than my learning to play ukulele, but hardly any better.

In any case, I can't play either one right now, over even tune them, since my thumb is broken. At least that's a legit excuse, eh?

Jig-word Cross-saw

So, you may know that Coco and I enjoy from time to time what we call Puzzle Time, that interval when we put on some music or an old black and white movie, and she sits at her puzzle station and works on a 1,000-piece eBoo jigsaw puzzle, and I sit nearby on the couch and do a NY Times crossword puzzle. It's a practice that arose during lockdown days, but one that we find peaceful and comfortable and plan to continue.

The puzzle station behind the couch

Well, today the two worlds collided. I was doing my lunchtime crossword and its title was JIGSAW PUZZLE.

The theme answers were descriptions of things you do with a jigsaw puzzle phrased in common expressions, such as PICK UP THE PIECES and GET IT TOGETHER. But the real cleverness of the puzzle lay in its incorporation of an actual jigsaw puzzle into the grid!

Look where I have outline the circled letters in some of the words - here's a closeup:

See how the F M E N forms a kind of upside-down T-shape? And how the R E T T S makes a backwards C? All those little arrangements of letters formed the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, like so:

And that cordoned off little section in the bottom of the puzzle is where the pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle to form the final answer!

I love puzzles that are challenging but interesting and have a nice payoff, rather than just being slogs through trivia or attempts at interpreting clues that are not just obscure but dubious.

Hats off to Christina Iverson and Jeff Chen - this puzzle was a winner!

Automobilia

So, today I went down to retrieve my Smart Car from Seattle, where he has been living in the care of a pal for majority of the pandemic, since we were all in lockdown and whatnot and he could be of more use down there than in my driveway. Driving the car again and seeing all the cars on the freeway got me thinking about cars in general, and I recalled that Jay Leno has or has had a show about the huge car collection that he has amassed over the years. I gather the collection comprises many rare and unusual vehicles, most of which I am given to understand are either very fancy or go very fast or both. I don't know why I started thinking about this, but it made me put together a list of cars that I would own, if I ever was in a position to have a huge garage and to obtain perfectly restored collector vehicles.

It's probably overlaps Jay's collection not at all...

Volkswagen 410

The first car I ever owned and I loved it. 

Datsun B0210 Honey Bee

I learned to drive stick on one of these. Very peppy.

Subaru Brat

Never had one, always wanted one... it has plastic seats in the pickup bed, for cryin' out loud!

Geo Metro Convertible

I have had two Geos, but never a droptop, even though I came close to buying one twice.

They are suh-weet.

Any Isetta

Three wheels and on a door that is the entire front of the car.

Originally made by a firm that used to make refrigerators.

How could you not fall in love with this?

Fiat 500

I have wanted one ever since J-Lo drove hers through the Bronx.

Test drove it a few years back - it was nice.

1960 NSU Prinz

Why this? Because of this:

(click to read story)

I guess I won't be going to any auto shows anytime soon, but it'll be nice to take the Smartie to work again.

Give the boi a hand

 So, yeah.

Way back when on August 25, I had a little mishap on the electrical bicycle.  Heading down the Bay Trail on the way to work, I was charged by a dog who had gotten loose from its human and decided to play. In an attempt to avoid running over the dog and going ass over teakettle, I swerved, bit the soft shoulder, and went ass over teakettle onto the embankment. Luckily a blackberry bush broke my fall and I didn't roll down onto the Burlington Northern tracks.

There was no harm done to the bike, the human was helpful and considerate, and the dog was suitably abashed, so I went on my way, little the worse for wear, although my left hand, upon which I think I landed with my full weight, was throbbing like heck, making a typically painful early morning meeting literally so. I wound up taking ibuprofen for some days, and iced my hand, and even put it in a brace to keep from overusing it, thinking I had a bad sprain.

I continued with the casual care until I noticed that a quite a bit of time had passed and that things had not completely recovered - the hand was still less than 100% functional and there was some lingering pain. I called the doctor and went in after about another week; she ordered an X-ray, which took me another few days to get. Lo and behold, it turned out it wasn't a bad sprain, it was an intra-articular avulsion fracture at the base of the proximal phalanx of the thumb likely underlying the ulnar collateral ligament insertion. Yep, a broken thumb.

I made it almost 64 years without a broken bone... doggo blew my record.

Anyway, doc wanted me to get it into a spica splint and immobilize the thumb so it could heal; the alternative was a cast, and nobody wants that. It took some doing - a decent splint is apparently not easy to come by, and the one I got at the pharmacy might have been good for tendonitis but wasn't doing the trick for an avulsion fracture. I finally got one today, from my doctor's own clinic no less.

So, if I am good boy, and the next set of X-rays in three weeks shows improvement, I may get out of this without plaster. Having been using the thumb broken for six weeks (it made a very interesting crunching noise from time to time), I am not confident of the prognosis.

In the meantime, I am doing my very best to keep it as immobile as possible (luckily I only hunt-and-peck type) and reflecting on how lucky I am in a circumstance like this:

• I have a job that allows me to work with a busted wing
• I have the flexibility to take the time to go to doctors and to get X-rays and to visit pharmacies
• I have health insurance that pays for a lot of this and resources to cover the rest
• I have a comfortable home and a supportive spouse to help me out

For me, this broken bone is a minor inconvenience and funny story. For some people, it would have a profound impact and possibly be a life-changing event. I try to never forget that, to never take my situation for granted, and to always remember my less fortunate sisters and brothers. 

I can always give them a hand.

The river flows

 

So, this birthday is a big milestone, one would suppose, based on the Beatles song that identifies this age as a turning point, the beginning of some sort of uncertain phase of life. Of course, it actually has no operational significance; tomorrow will be much the same as yesterday in any practical sense.

As I was looking back through old posts for insight into how to characterize this moment, if was first led to Heraclitus, who is famously to have said that you can't step into the same river twice - that change is constant. Less famously, Heraclitus can said to have been topped (in the tradition of old stand-up comedians) by Cratylus, who added to that observation the idea that you cannot even step into the same river once. Here's how the Oxford Reference puts it:

[T]he river is changing and gone even as a single event of stepping occurs. The point is that reality is utterly particular (one individual event, one moment of time, one individual thing after another). Any adequate thought would have to match the flux with change of its own, so any attempt to categorize reality is like trying to cage the winds

Now, I am certainly not going to say that Cratylus is spot on, but it sure does feel that way these days. Between COVID and about a jillion unknowns at work, it certainly seems that every particular moment is its own universe, one which bears only coincidental resemblance to the instant that precedes or follows it. It is not without consequence that "pivot" has been the word of the year - whether it is a profound philosophical truth or not, it has been a workaday reality that change has been our only constant. Which just makes it harder to pick any one of these moments as a milestone or watershed.

But contra Hearaclitus and Cratylus, my rifling through old blogs demonstrated that there has been constancy of a sort over the years. My reliance on Epicurean philosophy, Stoicism, and Absurdism is a thread; so is my series of summer self-improvement programs (at least when I had summers). I was having a conversation with someone the other day that brought home to me how much lore and understanding of the field my 24 years in the community and technical college system have given me. And of course, my family unit of me, Coco, and Selkie is still going strong. Maybe Jean-Baptiste Karr had it right when he said plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

In any case, the river flows on. Last night in our hot tub soak, Coco suggested we visualize a lazy river float as part of our reflection/mediation time. The river of life hasn't been so lazy lately, but that doesn't mean the river of the soul can't be. 

I'll think I'll just float past this "utterly particular" not-milestone with that in mind.

Twenty years

 A tragedy that has lasted much longer than a day. Well said here.

Memorial

Tired, and maybe like Mark Evanier, maybe tired of saying the same things. Read his post from today, and from two years ago.

A hope and a thought

Today we honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I usually post something historical and political, about the anti-racism and anti-establishmentism and anti-war and anti-capitalist and pro-labor work that King represents to me, trying to keep the grit and tension and struggle and pain present in a legacy that is often whitewashed into a peaceful, fluffy love note.

Today we find ourselves in what is clearly the most critical political moment in my lifetime, where even the cherished core of our very flawed democracy is at risk of destruction. At this moment, I find hope in Dr. King's oft-used paraphrase of the transcendentalist reformer Theodore Parker:

This is a hope, but it is only a hope. As Parker himself said of this moral arc in the original sermon: "I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience." We can only trust that Parker's, and King's, and our own consciences are correct.

That is a belief, but this is a conclusion based on observation and experience:

Unless and until that arc bends sufficiently, we have to keep making noise.

Dammit

 

So, we survived, barely, maybe. As somebody said, a failed coup is still a coup, and if a bunch of angry folks force their way into the Capitol building, causing lawmakers to flee, with the intent of subverting a legal election... well, sure smells like a coup to me.

It's tempting to write this off as another clown act from the circus of fascist wannabees, what with all their selfie-taking and podium-stealing and smoking in the building and the general milling about with the air of teenage trespassers. But some of the insurrectionists were armed and some had zipties (hostage taking?) and threats were made and bombs were found. For at least some of these yahoos, this was very real.

And it was planned in advance - social media caps show that. And it was encouraged - by a sitting president. And it was supported - by some of the very lawmakers whose constitutional procedure was interrupted and threatened by the riot.

And it is a crime.

I am hoping that federal and D.C. law enforcement investigates and prosecutes vigorously through the criminal justice system everyone who was associated with this.

I am hoping the Democratic Party will vigorously pursue all sanctions through the political system, including impeachment and refusing to seat those who supported the rioters.

I am hoping, but I am not at all confident.

Back in the day I had a friend who knew people in fascist Spain during the Franco era. She would visit them, and they would drink beer and play guitars and sing songs all while living in a surveillance state with press censorship, oppression of trade unions, decreased autonomy of local government, and the leader of the nation issuing death warrants for political opponents. I wondered what that must have been like, and try to get my head around what that mind space must have been like.

And I wonder whether and I worry that I will find out for myself, here, soon, unless there are some dramatic changes in our country.